‘He Was Constantly Creating’: Little-Seen Barkley Hendricks Photos Get a NY Showcase
‘He Was Constantly Creating’: Little-Seen Barkley Hendricks Photos Get a New York Showcase
Barkley L. Hendricks, who died in 2017, was known for his sleek, large-scale paintings of his friends. He was less widely known for the photographs taken in the course of producing those paintings.
Only recently did researchers and family members overseeing his archives begin to organize and dissect this little-studied part of his career. After his death, his widow and Jack Shainman, his longtime New York dealer, worked to select 60 photographs he’d taken and printed between 1965 and 2004. Some of those images, on view in a show at Shainman’s gallery that closes tomorrow, bring Hendricks’s world into focus.
Fashion and Politics in Barkley L. Hendricks’s Pictures
An artist of wide-ranging interests, he captured urban street style, American symbols, and musical greats—all with a unique passion.
The artist Barkley L. Hendricks was known during his lifetime, though not nearly well enough, for his swaggering portrait paintings. During travels in Europe as a young man, Hendricks had been struck by the absence of Black folks like him in the works of the Old Masters he admired. In paintings like “Lawdy Mama” (1969), showing a woman with a voluminous Afro against a gold-leaf, Byzantine-style background, Hendricks sought to redress this historical omission and make icons for a new era.
MYSELF WHEN I AM REAL
Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Myself When I Am Real, an exhibition featuring renowned artist Barkley L. Hendricks’ photographic work. The exhibition includes both vintage prints and works produced from the artist’s archive, which the Estate has been cataloging since his passing, and most of which have never been seen publicly. Presented together, these works illustrate the singular way Hendricks perceived the world.
A glimpse at Barkley L. Hendricks' unseen photography archive
A new show at Jack Shainman Gallery reveals the revered painter's lesser-known creative explorations.
Best known for his iconic paintings of Black figures, Barkley L. Hendricks was also a prolific photographer, something celebrated in the new show Myself When I Am Real at New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery. Having received his first camera in the mid-60s, Barkley studied under photojournalist Walker Evans at Yale, an experience that affirmed for him the value of documentary photography. “Just him being a Black photographer and shooting his everyday life — that’s radical,” remarks Elisabeth Sann, director at the gallery.
A New Exhibition Shows That Barkley L. Hendricks Was Never Simply a Painter
NEW YORK TIMES
Nearly Four Decades of Barkley L. Hendricks’s Photographs, on View in New York
Friends of the artist Barkley L. Hendricks, best known for his life-size paintings of stylish Black Americans, remember that he always had at least one camera hanging around his neck. Yet it wasn’t until after his death, in 2017, that his art dealer became aware of just how many photographs he had taken. The process of digitally archiving hundreds of thousands of negatives he left behind stretched over six years, and it’s not done yet. Dozens of never-before-seen images will be on view at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York this month alongside vintage prints, some of which Hendricks hand tinted himself.
The Electrifying Unseen Photographs of Painter Barkley L. Hendricks
A new exhibition in New York displays never-before-seen images by Barkley L Hendricks, a renowned American painter whose photography was lesser known – until now.
The late Barkley L Hendricks’ portraits blaze with cool. His subjects talk back at you with flair and brazenness. The gaze behind them is wry, playful, sharp. Hendricks is perhaps best known as a master of painting – as evidenced in his use of oil and gold leaf in Lawdy Mama (1969) and the vibrant figurative abstraction of Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris (1972). But Hendricks captured electrifying images without a paintbrush, too.
The Never-Before-Seen Photographs of Barkley L. Hendricks
Most people know the artist for his paintings gracefully embodying the Black experience in America. In an upcoming exhibition, his photographs take center stage.
Barkley L. Hendricks was known to wear his camera around his neck like an extension of himself. Most people associate the artist with his paintings that gracefully embody the Black experience in America. But in an upcoming exhibition titled Myself When I Am Real, opening at Jack Shainman Gallery on April 13, his photographs will take center stage.
‘Myself When I Am Real’ puts forth the unseen half of Barkley L. Hendricks’s practice
Jack Shainman Gallery will display the late painter’s photographic work, conveying his lighthearted approach to art-making and a glimpse into his immediate world
Barkley L. Hendricks was a pioneer of Black American portraiture—an assertive painter, with a style of his own, bent on depicting friends and strangers alike in life-sized, exacting detail. His subjects stand tall against monochromatic backdrops, dressed in their own clothes. It’s a subversion of the Western canon—culturally of its time, compositionally derived from the old masters—through which ordinary Black people could be foregrounded as subjects, within the gilded halls of fine art.
Barkley Hendricks’ Stanley Whitney Portrait Could Break Auction Record
Barkley L. Hendricks’s 1971 portrait of artist Stanley Whitney is poised to break a record when it comes up for auction in May.
The life-size Stanley pictures its titular subject standing in street clothes against a gold background, smoking a cigarette. It will be offered during a single-owner sale at Christie’s, where it has a low estimate of $5 million. If it reaches that figure, the sale will be a record price for a work by Hendricks, who died in 2017 at the age of 72.
BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: INTIMATE IMPRESSIONS
EDWARD HOPPER HOUSE MUSEUM & STUDY CENTER is pleased to present BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS: INTIMATE IMPRESSIONS on view from August 4 through October 23, 2022. Curated by Shari Fischberg, Intimate Impressions is organized in conjunction with the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and features eighteen rarely seen or never-before-exhibited landscape paintings created during the artist’s annual winter sojourns to the island of Jamaica.
Portraits by Barkley L. Hendricks Will Hang With Old Masters at the Frick
NEW YORK TIMES
He is the first artist of color to have a solo show at the 87-year-old museum, organized by Aimee Ng and Antwaun Sargent.
The portrait artist Barkley L. Hendricks, who died in 2017, considered the Frick Collection one of his favorite museums. Now Hendricks’s celebratory, large-scale paintings of Black Americans will hang in that institution, long the home of Rembrandt, Bronzino and Van Dyck, as the first artist of color to have a solo show at the 87-year-old Frick.
Barkley L. Hendricks - “My Mechanical Sketchbook”
Watch the PBS News Hour piece
Barkley L. Hendricks was an American painter who made pioneering contributions to black portraiture. Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston takes us to an exhibit of his work at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum and shows us how Hendricks used the camera as what he called his mechanical sketchbook.
Barkley L. Hendricks - “My Mechanical Sketchbook”
ART FORUM
Barkley L. Hendricks - “My Mechanical Sketchbook”
ROSE ART MUSEUM
415 South Street
Brandeis University
February 10–July 24, 2022
It is not surprising that Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) excelled at photography, or that his pictures were often source material for his flamboyant and intimate paintings of Black life in the years after the civil rights movement. Yet the relationship between the two media across his magnificent and beloved oeuvre has only recently been discussed, sparked by the posthumous discovery of some of his previously unknown photographic work. Hendricks’s exhibition at the Rose Art Museum, “My Mechanical Sketchbook”—a reference to the artist’s name for his camera—presents a focused assortment of photographs (including Polaroids), paintings, and works on paper created between 1966 and 2016.
‘Made Everyone Feel Like a Photographer’s Model’—See Images Here
Artnet News
A New Book on Barkley Hendricks Shows How the Artist ‘Made Everyone Feel Like a Photographer’s Model’—See Images Here
The book is part of a five-volume series dedicated to the artist's life and career.
The late artist Barkley L. Hendricks was best known as a painter, often capturing the swagger and gravitas of everyday Black people. He set full-length portraits of figures against monochromatic backgrounds so that both the person’s expression and their clothing and accessories were on full display. The paintings are as much a documentation of changing sartorial trends as they are snapshots of people.
What You Didn’t Know About Barkley L. Hendricks
NEW YORK TIMES
The less celebrated side of the artist’s career, his photographs, receive deserved attention in a new book.
Barkley L. Hendricks portrayed Black people who exude attitude. “In the Black community, you stand out because you declare your own sense of identity beyond your environment,” said his longtime friend Richard J. Watson, artist-in-residence at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. “When you see yourself shown as a standout — and not because you haven’t eaten in three days and you’re a symbol of poverty — that gives you respectability.”
Basketball and Barkley Hendricks: The Lesser Known Work of an Influential Artist
NEW YORK TIMES
A digital exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York includes several never-before-seen works by Hendricks relating to his love of the sport.
Breaking the rules always came easy to Barkley L. Hendricks. One of the most influential artists and photographers of the 20th century, he was best known for his portrayal of everyday black life in the United States. He often eschewed convention and experimented with shapes and space in his works unlike anyone had before him.